[davi]

Hey cool, 3rd author Shane Gonin is now at Janelia (where my lab is) and I know a bit about this work. Funny to see it pop up here.

The kind of electron microscopy (EM) of brain tissue I do relies upon embedding the tissue in a resin called Epon. Epon has excellent cutting properties and low intrinsic contrast in EM. But in order to embed tissue in Epon it has to be completely dehydrated, which quenches genetically expressed fluorphores like GFP.

My fantasy for these genetically expressed buckyball-like proteins is that one could engineer their interior to be sufficiently hydrophilic that GFP fluorescence would survive complete dehydration of the surrounding tissue, instead relying on the polarized residues of the amino acids in the interior. This would let us combine highest quality EM with highest quality light microscopy in the same sample -- which would be very useful indeed.

[dekhn]

I doubt you could avoid diffusion in these proteins to the point you desire. It would be worth looking into species that exploit cryptobiosis, specifically anhydrobiosis (rotifers, tardigrades, daphnia, and C. Elegans are all examples). In most cases they can dessicate extremely, some of them by exchanging glucose or water with trehalose (itself a fascinating topic worth further study), so i wonder if you could make trehalose binding sites inside the body.